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Daniel_Stuckey (2647775) writes "Last week, we learned that the National Security Agency has led an aggressive effort to “break widely used Internet encryption technologies.” The Office of the Director of National Intelligence claims it “would not be doing its job” if it didn't try to counter the encryption used by terrorists and cyber-criminals. There is speculation that many protocols or crypto implementations have been compromised, deliberately weakened, or have had backdoors inserted. In doing so, the NSA has made the Internet less safe for us all, perhaps including those that wish to take advantage of Bitcoin's privacy benefits.

Bitcoin is an open source cryptocurrency; a peer-to-peer (decentralized) electronic cash system. It's also the most powerful distributed computing project in the world. Those two factors have already brought it under government scrutiny."Link to Original Source

It means exactly the same thing as it means for every single other application that uses crypto: if the claims are true (and that's assuming a lot), then those applications aren't as secure as we thought. Obviously, by extension, this means Bitcoin wallets wouldn't be secure. Do we really need to have these "what does X mean for Bitcoin" stories for every single value of X? Bitcoin is pretty niche and yet there are quite a few stories on it, especially compared to some other, much more pervasive topics.